Roma Açık Tenis Turnuvası’nda tek erkeklerde dünya 1 numarası Novak Djokovic, geçen yıl şampiyon olduğu Roma’ya çeyrek finalde veda etti.

Başkent Roma’da Foro Italico Kompleksi’ndeki toprak kortlarda bu yıl 80’incisi düzenlenen turnuvaya tek erkekler kategorisinde çeyrek final müsabakalarıyla devam edildi.

Günün ilk maçında Roma Açık’ın son şampiyonu dünya 1 numarası Sırp Djokovic ile 7 numaralı seribaşı Danimarkalı Holger Rune, merkez kortta kozlarını paylaştı.

Holger Rune

DANİMARKALIDAN BİR İLK

Müsabakanın ilk setine iyi başlayamayan 35 yaşındaki Djokovic, ilk seti rakibine 6-2 kaybetti. İkinci sette toparlanan Djokovic, seti 6-4 alarak maça tutundu.

Temposunu düşürmeyen 20 yaşındaki Rune, karşılaşmanın final setini de 6-2 kazandı.

Novak Djokovic

Bir yağmur molası bir de Djokovic’in sağlık molası nedeniyle iki kez duran ve toplamda 2 saat 19 dakika süren mücadelenin setlerinde Sırp rakete 2-1 üstünlük kuran Rune, adını yarı finale yazdırdı. Bu sonuçla Rune, kariyerinde ilk kez Roma Açık’ta yarı final oynayacak.

İspanyol raket Rafael Nadal’dan sonra 6 kezle Roma’da en çok şampiyon olan ikinci isim olan Djokovic, bu turnuvada son 9 yılın 8’inde final oynamış, geçen yıl da şampiyon olmuştu.

Roma Açık Tenis Turnuvası’nda tek erkeklerde seribaşı raketler Rus Daniil Medvedev ile Rus Andrey Rublev tur atladı.

Başkent Roma’daki Foro Italico kompleksindeki toprak kortlarda bu yıl 80’incisi düzenlenen turnuvaya kadınlar ve erkeklerde 3. tur ve 4. tur müsabakalarıyla devam edildi.

Dünya 3 numarası Daniil Medvedev, 3. turda İspanyol rakibi Bernabe Zapata Miralles karşısında zorlansa da 3-6, 6-1 ve 6-3’lük setlerle korttan 2-1 galip ayrıldı ve adını son 16 raket arasına yazdırdı.

6 numaralı seribaşı Rus raket Andrey Rublev de 3.turda İspanyol rakibi Alejandro Fokina’yı 7-6(8) ve 6-3’lük iki set sonucunda 2-0 yenerek, bir üst tura yükseldi.

Tek kadınlarda kategorisinde 7 numaralı seribaşı Kazak Elena Rybakina, 4. turda Çekya’dan Marketa Vondrousova’yı 6-3’lük iki setle 2-0 yenerek çeyrek finale çıktı.

8 numaralı seribaşı Rus raket Daria Kasatkina ise Letonyalı Jelena Ostapenko’ya 4-6, 6-4 ve 0-6’lık setlerle 2-1 kaybederek Roma’ya veda etti.

Bu arada, Roma’da günün yoğun yağışlı geçmesi sebebiyle turnuva organizasyonu akşam seansında oynanması gereken müsabakaları yarına erteledi.

Dünya 5 numarası Yunan raket Stefanos Tsitsipas’ın ev sahibi ülkeden Lorenzo Sonego ile yaptığı ve ilk setini 6-3 kazandığı maç da hava muhalefetine takılan karşılaşmalardan oldu.

Tek kadınlarda dünya 1 numarası Polonyalı Iga Swiatek’in de 4. turda Hırvat Donna Vekic ile yapacağı müsabaka yoğun yağış nedeniyle ertelendi.

Video Duration 47 minutes 24 seconds 47:24

Stefan Pongo is a hardworking Roma truck driver living in Manchester. He emigrated with his family from the Czech Republic to the United Kingdom in 2006, to protect them from racial discrimination.

His children have since graduated from university and his family is doing well. But the echoes of hate carry over from his homeland.

When the Czech president claims that the Roma are work-shy, Pongo issues an appeal on social media asking for photos of Roma working. He receives thousands of images and becomes a well-known media figure, and soon a voice for Roma communities in Europe.

His journey takes him from a world of social media notoriety to starting his own aid charity. But all that comes at the cost of lost time with his family.

Pongo Calling is a film by Tomas Kratochvil.  

The 16-year-old boy’s shooting last week led to days of protests in Thessaloniki, Athens and other parts of Greece.

A teenage boy from Greece’s Roma community who was shot in the head during a police chase over an allegedly unpaid petrol station bill has died, according to members of the Roma community and the hospital that was treating him.

The 16-year-old had been hospitalised for more than a week in the northern city of Thessaloniki after he was shot in the early hours of December 5 by a police officer on a motorcycle.

Officers were chasing the boy after he allegedly filled up his pick-up truck at a petrol station and left without paying the 20-euro ($21) bill.

The shooting led to days of often violent protests in Thessaloniki, Athens and other parts of Greece by members of the Roma community, despite pleas by community officials and some members of the boy’s family to maintain calm.

“Everyone here is crying. It is unjust for a child to leave like this,” said Antonis Tasios, secretary of the Roma community where the boy lived, confirming his death on Tuesday. “We have great pain.”

The hospital treating the boy, who has not been formally identified, said he was hospitalised in critical condition in the intensive care unit after undergoing emergency surgery, but that despite all efforts by medical staff, he died on Tuesday morning.

Racist motives

The Roma community has denounced the shooting as having racist motives.

Several Roma men were injured or fatally shot in recent years while allegedly seeking to evade arrest for breaches of the law.

Members of the Roma community in Greece have long faced discrimination, and many live on the margins of society.

The 34-year-old police officer accused of firing the shot has been suspended and under house arrest since Friday pending a court decision on whether to remand him into custody before trial in a felony count of attempted manslaughter with possible intent and a misdemeanour count of illegally firing his weapon.

Police have said the teenager tried to ram the police motorcycles involved in the chase with his pick-up truck.

The officer said during an initial court appearance last week that he had fired his weapon because he feared for the lives of his colleagues.

Citizens’ Protection Minister Takis Theodorikakos, who has jurisdiction over Greek police, tweeted his “deep sorrow for the death of the 16-year-old boy” and extended his condolences to the teenager’s family.

“I repeat that this case is being investigated by the judicial system, which is the only one competent to assess the facts and judge responsibilities,” the minister wrote. “Let us all respect that.”

On October 22, Giorgia Meloni, leader of the right-wing Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party, was sworn in as Italy’s prime minister. She formed a government with two other parties notorious for their populist and racist rhetoric and policies: Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, and Matteo Salvini’s Lega (League).

Many across Europe are rightfully concerned about the impact the most right-wing government in Italy since the end of World War II will have on the continent. And so are the Roma of Italy. Their situation has been untenable for years. Regardless of who was in power, they faced regular police harassment, forced evictions, and hate crimes.

But with this right-wing coalition in power, the plight of the Romani people may get much worse. Both Berlusconi and Salvini have a long track record of anti-Roma policies, while Meloni has a history of racist anti-Roma rhetoric. If and when the new government starts its assault on Roma communities, the European Union must not stay silent, as it has so often done over the past 15 years.

The fascist past

Despite living on the Italian peninsula since the 14th century, Romani people have historically been seen as outsiders in Italian society. That is why they, alongside Jews, were targeted by the fascist state from the 1920s to the 1940s. In 1926, just four years after coming to power, Benito Mussolini’s fascist government issued an order to expel all “foreign Gypsies” and “cleanse the country of all Gypsy caravans”. Those who remained were regularly harassed and arrested.

In 1940, his interior ministry started the internment of Roma and Sinti in Italian concentration camps where many were either murdered, deported to Nazi death camps, or died of hunger or poor conditions.

Italy has never really come to terms with its fascist history and, after the end of World War II, Romani people continued to be viewed with suspicion and hatred. When Roma from the Balkans began arriving in Italy in the 1960s, the local authorities started putting them in so-called “nomad camps” based on the racist assumption that Romani people were listless vagrants. But the Yugoslav Roma were coming from a sedentary lifestyle, never having been nomadic in their lives.

These policies persisted and, by the 1980s, received financial and legislative support in some Italian provinces. At the same time, negative perceptions in Italian society that Roma are criminals and illegal immigrants grew. In the 2000s, this allowed populist politicians like Berlusconi to politicise the issue and use it for electoral gain.

Berlusconi’s ‘nomad emergency’

Shortly after forming his third government in May 2008, Berlusconi declared his so-called “nomad emergency” and subjected the Roma to police intimidation, illegal detentions and deportations. He justified the fingerprinting of Romani children, ethnic censuses of Romani people, and deployment of troops to crack down on so-called “Gypsy criminality”.

During his tenure, the construction of segregated “nomad camps” became the de facto policy of choice for provincial authorities to accommodate Roma who could not be deported under a 2007 law, allowing expulsions of people deemed to “threaten” public safety. In later years, after the camps were neglected and left without access to basic services, the authorities started forcefully evicting Romani families from them.

The Italian government promised to close these camps in its previous 2012-2020 National Strategy for the Inclusion of Roma, Sinti and Caminanti but, in practice, it started demolishing homes and turning families out onto the street without providing them with alternative accommodation.

In 2011, the Council of State, a consultative body that ensures the legality of administrative activities, ruled that the “nomad emergency” was “unfounded, unmotivated and unlawful” and in 2013, the Court of Cassation upheld its decision. Nevertheless, Berlusconi’s policies became a template for state violence against the Roma. Police raids and intimidation, the systematic use of punitive forced evictions and surveillance tactics against the Roma have continued under successive governments.

The European Roma Rights Centre’s census of forced evictions estimates that between 2017 and 2021 there were 187 evictions of Romani families, resulting in 3,156 people becoming homeless.

Salvini’s incitement to violence

Berlusconi’s anti-Roma campaign also paved the way for the far-right in mainstream Italian politics. Salvini saw its electoral success and embraced it fully. In 2013, he took control of what was then called Lega Nord (Northern League) and, in his bid to transform the party, built a political platform almost entirely on scapegoating and securitising Romani people and immigrants.

In June 2018, Salvini became deputy prime minister and interior minister in a coalition cabinet with the populist Five Star Movement. Within a month of taking office, he closed Italian ports to ships carrying refugees and called for a census of the Roma to facilitate their deportation, noting that “unfortunately” those holding Italian citizenship could not be deported. He also threatened to remove Romani children from their families if they were not sent to school.

Salvini’s stint as interior minister incited anti-Roma actions throughout Italy. Following his calls for a census, the Regional Council of Lombardy passed a motion to initiate “mapping of the Roma and Sinti settlements” to “counteract the situations of urban illegality and degradation and to guarantee civil coexistence”.

Far-right groups such as Forza Nuova and Casa Pound also organised anti-Roma marches and incited violent hate crimes against Romani communities. In April 2019, teenagers in Naples threw stones at two Romani mothers and their children and threatened to stab them. The same month, in a suburb of Rome, a 300-strong mob led by Casa Pound set fire to dumpsters, shouted racist insults and tried to prevent the placement of 70 Roma in a local reception centre. While dozens performed fascist salutes, the crowd chanted “those b******* must burn” and “they must die of hunger”.

In May that year, in another suburb of Rome, a Romani family had to be escorted by police in and out of a social housing building because a mob led by Casa Pound screamed threats of rape and murder at them.

The most anti-Roma government

Having lived through a decade and a half of Berlusconi and Salvini’s anti-Roma policies, Italy’s Roma have good reason to fear what comes next, as Meloni heads a coalition with both. Although she herself has mostly stayed away from inciteful Salvini-style rhetoric, she nevertheless holds nativist beliefs and anti-Roma ideas and embraces the policies of institutional violence inherited from Berlusconi.

What is worse is that her party’s origins lie firmly in Italy’s fascist movement. Meloni herself has said that Mussolini was “a good politician” and “everything he did, he did for Italy”. She appears to believe in the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, that white Europeans are being deliberately replaced by non-European immigrants in what constitutes a form of genocide.

Judging by the past record of Meloni and her coalition partners, their government will not only continue anti-Roma policies but will also step up toxic, racist politics in Italy. Her rise to power has emboldened fascist sympathisers, as became apparent on October 31, when thousands chanted slogans and performed fascist salutes in Mussolini’s hometown to mark the 100th anniversary of his march on Rome and seizure of power.

This should concern the rest of the EU, too. Brussels was silent when Berlusconi declared Roma a security threat and forced them from their homes. Salvini’s hate speech was often met with outrage, but little action. In 2017, the European Commission blocked a report recommending sanctions against Italy over its mistreatment of Roma. Then in 2019, it closed its file on possible legal action against Italy over discrimination against Romani people in housing.

After 15 years of ignoring antigypsyism in Italy, the EU now has a chance to make amends. The dangers are too great to continue to turn a blind eye to the steady rise of fascism in Italy and its threat to Romani lives.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

DUVAR – İtalya Serie A ekiplerinden Roma, PSG’den Georginio Wijnaldum’u kadrosuna kattı. Kulüpten yapılan açıklamada, Hollandalı oyuncunun satın alma opsiyonuyla kiralandığı belirtildi. 

Transferin duyurulduğu video ise havuzun içinde bulunan 31 yaşındaki orta saha oyuncusu Roma formasıyla havuzdan çıktı. Video sosyal medyada gündem olurken 30 binden fazla beğeni aldı.

Transferi nedeniyle çok mutlu olduğunu söyleyen Wijnaldum, “Roma oyuncusu olmak gerçekten heyecan verici. Konuştuğum tüm insanlar bana kulüp ve taraftarlar hakkında mükemmel duygular verdi. Kulüp, son günlerde sosyal medyada bana sevgi gösteren tüm taraftarlar gibi, anlaşmayı olumlu bir şekilde kapatmak için yapılan çabalarla beni ne kadar istediklerini gösterdi. Bu her zaman bir oyuncuya çok fazla güven verir” ifadelerini kullandı. (HABER MERKEZİ)

Yeni tip corona virüsü (Covid-19) salgını nedeniyle bu yıla ertelenen ve 12 ülkenin ortak ev sahipliğinde 11 Haziran-11 Temmuz’da düzenlenecek EURO 2020‘de verilecek şampiyonluk kupası, Azerbaycan‘ın başkenti Bakü‘ye getirildi.

EURO 2020’nin maskotu Skillzy’nin eşlik ettiği kupa, Gobustan Korusu, İçerişehir, Ateşgah, Haydar Aliyev Merkezi gibi tarihi anıt ve modern yapıların önünde sergilendikten sonra karşılaşmaların yapılacağı Bakü Olimpiyat Stadı‘na getirildi.

Kupa ayrıca, Cumhurbaşkanı İlham Aliyev‘e de götürüldü.

Daha önce Roma, Bükreş ve Budapeşte’de sergilenen kupa, Bakü’den sonra Kopenhag‘a götürülecek.

Yeni dönemin planlamasına erkenden başlayan ve şampiyonluk takımı kurmaya çalışan Trabzonspor büyük oynuyor…

Karadeniz gazetesinde yer alan habere nazaran; Birinci olarak Roma’nın sağ beki Bruno Peres ile el sıkışan Bordo-Mavililer, Kasımpaşa ile mukavelesi bitecek olan Fode Koita’yla da anlaştı. Bir sürpriz yaşanmaması halinde iki ismin de Haziran ayında resmi mukavelelere imza atması bekleniyor.

Cornelius’un opsiyonu var

Peres transferiyle İtalya pazarına giren Fırtına, sürat kesmeden Çizme’de görüşmelerini sürdürüyor. Cornelius konusunda önemli adımlar atan Trabzonspor İdaresi, 28 yaşındaki Danimarkalı santforu iknaya yakın. Temel sorun ise bonservis ayrıntısı. O denli ki Atalanta’nın Parma’ya kiraladığı Cornelius’un 7 milyon Euro’luk satın alma opsiyonu var. Lakin Parma küme düşüyor.

İki kulüple de görüşülüyor

Serie A’da kalması mucize olan Parma’nın 7 milyon Euro’yu bulması sıkıntı gözüküyor. Bordo-Mavililer gelişmeleri yakından takip ederken, şayet Parma opsiyonu kullanırsa, Cornelius oradan kiralanacak zira oyuncu alt ligde oynamak istemiyor. Başka ihtimalde ise Atalanta kulübüyle temaslar sıklaştırılacak. Vitor Hugo transferindeki üzere uzun vadeli bir ödeme planıyla bonservis alınacak.

Gervinho’dan yeşil ışık

Fırtına’nın İtalya’daki büyük amacı ise Gervinho… Çizme basınına nazaran Fildişili yıldız dönem bitiminden Parma’dan ayrılıyor. Bordo-Mavililer, her iki kanadın yanı sıra forvette de misyon yapabilen 33 yaşındaki oyuncuyla temas kurdu. Gervinho gelmeye sıcak baktı. Serie A’da çıktığı 23 maçta 5 gol, 1 asistlik performans gösteren Gervinho’nun transferiyle idare bombayı patlatmak istiyor.

45 milyon Euro’luk adam

Arsenal, Roma üzere Avrupa’nın dev kadrolarında forma giyen Gervinho için bugüne kadar toplam 45 milyon Euro bonservis bedeli ödendi. Belçika’da yıldızını parlatıp 2007’de 650 bin Euro’luk bedelle Le Mans’ın yolunu tutan Fildişili hamleci, devamında 6.5 milyon Euro’ya Lille’e transfer oldu. Lille’de dönemin oyuncusu seçilip, 2 senede 2 de kupa kaldıran Gervinho, 2010 ve 2011’de ülkesinde de en değerli futbolcu mükafatına layık görüldü. 2011’in yazında 12 milyon Euro karşılığında Arsenal’e giden Gervinho’yu; 2013’te 8 milyon Euro ödeyerek Roma aldı. 2.5 sene Roma’da kaldıktan sonra China Fortune, Gervinho için adeta bir serveti gözden çıkardı. Çin kulübü, Roma’ya 18 milyon Euro bonservis bedeli verirken, Gervinho’yla da yıllık 8 milyon Euro maaşa anlaştı. 2.5 dönemlik Çin macerasının akabinde Avrupa’ya dönen 33 yaşındaki yıldız, Parma’da grubun sembol isimlerinden biri haline geldi.